Although this is in a sense a 'feature request', I'm posting here, in the Hotline thread, because I do think it's important enough to be posted here.

I believe the following changes should be made to the automatic match making system:

1. The system for pairing up opponents (possibly only when on the amber traffic light) needs to take into account the player's respective Rank, Level, and ELO, and preferably match players of similar experience and skill (as judged by those three stats) - perhaps with the player requesting the match-up having some control over how much either side of their own Rank, Level, and ELO any opponent should be.

And:

2. More information about the chosen opponent (including their Level and ELO) should be shown on the 'match found' popup.

And:

3. There needs to be the possibility to decline a match - either from the 'match found' popup, or, preferably, either from there or from within the match during turn 1 (or the pre-match bid turn for game types such as charge).

Now, why do I think this is important enough to go in the Hotline thread?

Well, because I suspect (though, of course I can not know for sure) that the frustration caused by a) not being able to decline matches, and b) being continually matched with players of much higher ability, to be the primary reason for i) player turnover (i.e. players leaving because they don't feel they can progress in the game), and ii) abandoned games (because that's the only choice one is presented with when faced with a match one simply does not want to play).

The LEVEL means nothing, useless. You can remove it from FS.This game it's like chess, you can play years and learn nothing or you can play 1 day and be a winner.Doesn't matter how many games you played.

wonderhero wrote:The LEVEL means nothing, useless. You can remove it from FS.This game it's like chess, you can play years and learn nothing or you can play 1 day and be a winner.Doesn't matter how many games you played.

I agree it may not be an accurate reflection of skill, but it does show experience - as in number of games played.

ELO and Rank are, of course, going to be the most important factors, but if I were implementing my suggestion, and whilst you've got Level there, I'd make use of it.

The more things you factor in the more likely you are to get a good match-up.

I just made this post in the general section and hope that people will have a look and share their ideas, but I really feel it also deserves to be in this thread.I wont repeat all 9000 thought out characters of my post but simply say that as the game stands for new players there is a distinct lack of clarity in the UI OR a distinct lack of immersiveness in the campaign. Only 0.9% of people (that play through steam) have finished the campaign - I've had the game since essentially release and thoroughly enjoy it, but I'm part of the other 99.1%.

If the singleplayer is the focus of the game, there is a huge lack of storytelling and something should be added to help players feel more immersed in the plot and the game as a whole - which will in turn lead to exploration of the games finer details and a lack of distress over the UI.

If the multiplayer is the focus of the game, the UI is inhibiting the ability of new players to learn what is going on and feel comfortable with the community. Chats should be open by default with minimize or resize buttons, the news feed should be smaller and only display important things, the help menus should be spread out with more clear cut focused details, the tournament menu could do with a complete overhaul, THERE SHOULD BE A FRIENDS LIST, pressing the search button (magnifying glass) which opens a menu with a blank bar search engine - that first nature tells you is for finding a player profile neatly laid out with an add friend button or a chat button etc. should not be cluttered with player 1 player 2 bars and game ID bars etc. unless explained elsewhere, after the result screen of a game you shouldn't be looking at a menu full of random buttons most people don't ever click on (to begin the list of things that could be changed about the UI)

I really love this game and hate to see it fail in terms of being popular and widespread, but the retention of the population is so low and the commitment to players like myself who come online on a near daily basis yet have not even finished the campaign is very weak. Again you can find my full post here : http://forums.mode7games.com/viewtopic.php?f=20&t=4531 Which comes complete with explanations and support for my claims.

I am not a game designer and I have the utmost respect for Mode7 and the developers of FS, but something needs to be done about the game as is.

Totally agree. It would be much better to show a player's ranking rather than their level, that way you actually know how good they are... with the current system, I have to go through the online list checking each profile individually trying to find someone near my rank to challenge, which gets tedious pretty quickly.

If their rank was displayed I could immediately throw down the gauntlet to those just above me!

Ok this forum is slowly but steadily being drowned in spam. It doesn't look like you guys (devs) are really paying that much attention to it at the mo, probably due to working hard on the iPad version (which looks AWESOME I must say).

So I will put my hand up and volunteer, if you think it would help, to be a mod for the sole purpose of cleaning up all the damn spam threads and posts. I've done it before on another forum, I'm an active player and I think the games rocks. That's my argument, I promise I won't go on a rampage of deleting and banning legitimate posts and members

Hey,I've added some new things to the forums to help cut down on the spam a lot, hence why the board has been intermittently unavailable today.Thanks for the offer whisky_bravo. If this doesn't help we'll talk about adding more volunteer moderators but hopefully that won't be necessary.

I stopped playing FS a while ago because of lack of time, but i plan on starting to play again as I really love this game. What's holding me back are some well known issues so I'm gonna take a stab at them. It's been over 6 months since the devs last responded so it cannot hurt to refresh your memories.

First of all, Two-week-timeout. If you can't fix this at least tell us what's the problem with it. Why is it so hard to declare the person who primed his turn the winner? I have no experience in game designing or server handling, so if there's a reason please enlighten me. I really want to know. My feeling is that it's not beeing worked on.

Option to accept or decline a game and option to state a reason why I declined a game. Reasons should be clear by now.

Showing ELO expectations (how much can i loose/win in the worst/best case) before the game and affect of ELO after a game has been finished. It would even be enough for me to implement an ELO-calculator in the game that uses the currently active algorithm. Wouldn't be ideal but I could work with that for a while. Rank matters to me and I want to know what happens to my ELO.

Showing clearly what active games I have and how long it was since the last turn was taken. I could actually live without this and it's definitely not as pressing as the two above, but it belongs here anyways.

Last and least, as I think this is really way under the priority of the above, the rank freezing. Making a player invisible on the ranking after not finishing a game for X months cannot be that difficult (as before, no expert and happy to be proven wrong ). It would really raise the spirit of players, if they can get higher in ranking without having to beat the score of long gone players. I see no reason to punish players for not playing though, as Scorpion0x17 suggested.